They sat down on the queer old chairs, and looked out of the dim and grimy panes to the ruined lawn, and the fallen urns, and the deserted Triton.
Presently Dyson ceased his imitation of eighteenth century airs; he no longer pulled forward imaginary ruffles, or tapped a ghostly snuffbox.
“It’s a foolish fancy,” he said at last, “but I keep thinking I hear a noise like someone groaning. Listen; no, I can’t hear it now. There it is again! Did you notice it, Phillipps?”
“No, I can’t say I heard anything. But I believe that old places like this are like shells from the shore, ever echoing with noises. The old beams, mouldering piecemeal, yield a little and groan, and such a house as this I can fancy all resonant at night with voices, the voices of matter so slowly and so surely transformed into other shapes; the voice of the worm that gnaws at last the very heart of the oak; the voice of stone grinding on stone, and the voice of the conquest of time.”
They sat still in the old armchairs and grew graver in the musty ancient air—the air of a hundred years ago.
“I don’t like the place,” said Phillipps, after a long pause. “To me it seems, as if there were a sickly, unwholesome smell about it, a smell of something burning.”
“You are right; there is an evil odor here. I wonder what it is! Hark! Did you hear that?”
A hollow sound, a noise of infinite sadness and infinite pain broke in upon the silence; and the two men looked fearfully at one another, horror and the sense of unknown things glimmering in their eyes.
“Come,” said Dyson, “we must see into this,” and they went into the hall and listened in the silence.
“Do you know,” said Phillipps, “it seems absurd, but I could almost fancy that the smell is that of burning flesh.”
They went up the hollow-sounding stairs, and the odor became thick and noisome, stifling the breath; and a vapor, sickening as the smell of the chamber of death, choked them. A door was open and they entered the large upper room, and clung hard to one another, shuddering at the sight they saw.
A naked man was lying on the floor, his arms and legs stretched wide apart, and bound to pegs that had been hammered into the boards. The body was torn and mutilated in the most hideous fashion, scarred with the marks of red-hot irons, a shameful ruin of the human shape. But upon the middle of the body a fire of coals was smouldering; the flesh had been burned through. The man was dead, but the smoke of his torment mounted still, a black vapor.
“The young man with spectacles,” said Mr. Dyson.
Colophon
The Three Impostors
was published in 1895 by
Arthur Machen.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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Marc D’Hooghe
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El Conjuro o Las Brujas,
a painting completed in 1797–98 by
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